


The Impatient Patient

by AnnaofAza



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Grumpy Harry Hart, Harry Hart Lives, M/M, Post-Movie(s), Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 07:32:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5531081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaofAza/pseuds/AnnaofAza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And you will ring the bell if you need help." </p><p>Merlin catches the barest hint of a smirk before Harry nods placidly. "I promise," he says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Impatient Patient

**Author's Note:**

> For [Dia!](dianyx.tumblr.com) This is my first time writing someone in a relationship with more than one person. I hope you like it, and Merry Christmas!

Merlin's trained recruits of all attitudes before. He's had trainees curse, yell, threaten, and even, once, try to put laxatives in his tea. He should be used to whining and carrying on by now without wanting to scream, but this is severely testing his limits. 

"Eat. Your. Soup." Merlin growls. He doesn't offer to feed Harry. Not yet.

"No," Harry says, stubborn as a mule—no, an ass. An utter and complete one, in a ridiculous red robe and greasy hair that hasn't been washed in nearly a week.

"Harry," Eggsy now tries, eyes widening in what Merlin's beginning to compare to JB's while at someone's feet—particularly if that someone is eating bacon. "Harry, please, eat the soup."

Harry doesn't budge. "No."

Eggsy teaches forward, fingers just grazing Harry's cheek when the other man jerks his head away.

"Nobody touch me!” Harry snaps crossly. ”For pity’s sake, stop hovering—both of you."

Eggsy draws away, clearly annoyed and hurt, but Merlin steps in. “No,” he says firmly. “You were granted special permission to leave Medical to go back to the comfort of your own home if you rested. So far, you have resisted us every step of the way.”

"I'm not helpless! Just because I—"

"Got shot in the head and were put in an induced coma so you could make a recovery, a recovery that the entire medical team to remove that bullet from your brain and two flat lines, not to mention physical therapy that you still haven't completed." Merlin glares, staring Harry down with over two decades' worth of experience. "We both care for you, Harry." He touches Harry's arm and squeezes quickly, before letting go. Merlin rarely shows physical affection; he's more comfortable with showing it through action, through advice and encouragement through the distant comfort of glasses and comms.

Eggsy is the tactile one, always at ready to offer his arm to help Harry up while Merlin orders, "Get up, you bastard." Eggsy's the one to spend hours holding Harry's hand, reading him a novel or offering him tea, while Merlin quietly arranges for Harry's favorite meals to be delivered to the doorstep and for the team back at HQ to hurry up on Harry's prosthetic eye. Eggsy's the one to kiss Harry on the cheek before saying good night, while Merlin only gruffly says, "See you in the morning."

To outsiders, if they perceived a relationship between the three, they would think Eggsy was the good cop, while Merlin was the bad, but they both love Harry in only different ways—not on different levels.

Now, Merlin tries to find a way to get this infuriating man to not only eat, but to ask for help. He knows—not just from the cameras he'd installed in Harry's house before the man got discharged from the hospital—that Harry abhors his loss of control.

Harry hates the way his hands shake with every spoonful of soup, hates when his lips form words that sometimes can't come out, and hates when his head hurts so badly that he sometimes can't even get out of bed. For a man whose every action and every word is deliberate, Harry can't bear it when his mind and body betray him.

Eggsy suddenly speaks up: "What if Harry had a bell?”

“Lad, as delightful as that sounds—"

“I did it for Daisy when she got a bug a few weeks ago," Eggsy explains. "Her throat was hurting real bad, so I got her a little bell that she could ring if she needed something instead of shouting."

To Merlin's surprise, Harry nods. "I will be amenable to that, if that means you both won't fuss over me like mother hens."

It can't be that easy, but if it is, Merlin will take it. “Fine. We will give you your space. But Eggsy will still live in this house, and he and I will rotate to make sure a physical presence is here."

“All right.”

“And you will ring the bell if you need help.”

 Merlin catches the barest hint of a smirk before Harry nods placidly. "I promise," he says.

\---

The first week, Harry rings the bell a total of one thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-two times. Eggsy had been willing and ready, but even the boy's devotion couldn't assuage his irritation at Harry's increasingly finicky demands.

On the first day, Harry had rang nine times in under two minutes—for a specific book, for tea, for a spoon to stir the tea with, for milk and sugar for said tea, for a pillow to prop himself up on the couch, for a blanket, for a different blanket with less itchy fabric, and for a second blanket, an electric one that Merlin had gifted him for his birthday two years ago.

There also the fact that Eggsy's thumbs are sore from pressing various buttons on the television remote, his fingers cramping from multiple foot massages, and his throat's giving out from reading all of _Stardust_ , then nearly a quarter of _Pride and Prejudice._

"He also made me dust Mr. Pickles!" Eggsy now snarls. "Dust. His. Dead. Dog. Then he had me put a Santa hat on it for the holidays!"

"This was your idea, Eggsy," Merlin points out, still holding a warm container of curry from the Indian place down the block. "Well, at least he's asking for help."

"Eggsy, dear," Harry then sings from his bedroom, voice too chipper for eleven o'clock at night, "can you fetch me some tea?"

"He had me make it three times!" Eggsy hisses. "First, he said it was too cold, then it didn't have enough sugar, then—"

"I assure you, Eggsy, that he has nothing against you. Harry's always been a little shit, and he's doing this to regain some semblance of control." Merlin smiles at him. "You're doing well, lad. I would have locked him in his panic room with a thermos of tea and ramen noodles in the second hour."

Eggsy, as always, beams at the praise, then laughs at Merlin's dry humor. "I love him—God, I do—but how did you stay with him for...well, as long as you have?"

Merlin rolls his eyes. "Because he's the love of my fucking life, that's why." He then reaches over to take Eggsy's hand in his; honestly, he's going soft. "And I'm beginning to realize that I can have more than one. I'll get that tea, and you go rest."

 ---

Merlin hates to have Eggsy bear the brunt of Harry's irritableness, but his place is at HQ, trying to keep Kingsman together and scraping together the remnants of the world to heal.

He and Eggsy were brought together by the trial by fire—V-Day—and shared burdens. Merlin had pressed the button to destroy hundreds of world leaders—albeit corrupt—and Eggsy failed to save thousands while Valentine's palm rested on his deadly machine. Both also blamed themselves for Harry—Merlin for not being able to prevent him from slaughtering nearly a hundred civilians and to save him from getting shot, and Eggsy for letting him walk out the door to his death and only being able to watch.

So when Harry came back, their world felt like flipping upside down, then righting itself, then switching again.

Eggsy had been afraid of Merlin leaving him—he'd known he and Harry had been involved for years—but Merlin, and later, Harry told him that no such thing was going to happen.

"It's unconventional, but I don't give a damn," Merlin had said.

Merlin no longer gives a damn. He's used to people disagreeing with him, as is Harry, and now that Kingsman is in ruins, they can't argue very successfully on trivial matters. Eggsy's in-statement to Kingsman would have been at least a year of direct campaigning for him to leave with several doses of the amnesia dart, but the world had no time for petty squabbling. Like it or not, Eggsy is a knight—and a true one.

On missions, he's determined and gets the job done as quickly as he can, and with Lancelot, they're a formidable team. Merlin thinks Roxy knows about him and Eggsy and Harry, but he's not one-hundred percent sure. Kingsman's second-newest agent is discreet.

Which is good. Two men in a relationship are enough to have some of the more...conventional agents clutch their pearls. Three might cause coronaries.

 ---

Merlin wakes up in the middle of the night.

He's between Harry and Eggsy on the couch. The television is still on, reverted back to the main menu of the DVD they were watching. Stale popcorn remnants perch on the coffee table, along with cookies from Percival and Roxy.

Eggsy still has crumbs around his mouth. He's softly snoring, head in Merlin's lap, and Harry's head is on Merlin's right shoulder. His glasses are skewed on his face, and he's in that robe that Merlin ought to throw away one day.

Harry usually talks in his sleep—but tonight, he's moaning quietly, deep from his chest. Nightmares.

Merlin pushes at him, hissing Harry's name, until the other man's eyes snap open. For a moment, his hands grapple in the air, as if trying to grab something, then still. A hunk of hair falls across his forehead, and Harry impatiently shoves it away, eyes wild.

"It's all right, Harry," Merlin says soothingly, "it's all right."

"Wh—Harry?" Eggsy then murmurs sleepily. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Harry quickly replies. "Go back to sleep, both of you."

Eggsy, eyes still closed, reaches for Harry and squeezes his hand. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Harry shakes his head, firmly. "Go back to sleep," he repeats.

"Have you finished _Pride and Prejudice_?" Eggsy then asks, but doesn't wait for a reply. He gets up and retrieves it from the shelf, holding it open near the flow of the television screen. "All right, Merlin, want to start us off?"

He and Eggsy take turns reading until Harry closes his eyes, content, and falls back asleep.

 ---

Harry's about to give Merlin an aneurysm. 

Eggsy's on a mission with Roxy to destroy one of Valentine's factories and wipe out every trace of his prototypes, blueprints, and spare SIM cards and chips. Amelia's handling this mission, and so far, the emergency signal Merlin's programmed in his glasses hasn't gone off.

Merlin, in a span of less than two hours, has had Harry curse at him in five different languages and nearly throw a bowl of soup at him. Not to mention ringing the damn bell almost every five minutes—

"I draw the line at singing for you," Merlin now says flatly, at two am. "I only sing when I'm drunk, and I'm not getting drunk."

Harry crosses his arms. "But I'm bored."

"And you sound like a five-year-old. I'm not Eggsy. I'm not going to indulge your every whim. Is there nothing on the telly?" Merlin sighs. "Go the fuck to sleep, Harry."

Just then, a beeping comes from his glasses. It's Amelia.

"Merlin, you need to come down to HQ."

 ---

"Eggsy," Harry whispers, clutching the lad's hand so tightly that Merlin warns him about snapping the bones. "Eggsy."

"I'm all right, you lot. Just...tired." Eggsy smiles weakly, despite the bandages wrapped around his head. There's more color in his cheeks than when he was brought in, but he still looks sickly underneath the hospital lights and white sheets. "Luckily, Roxy got a drop on the guard before he shot me again—"

"You're going to have a scar to match Harry's, lad." Merlin interrupts, inwardly shuddering at the memory of Eggsy's hair matted with blood. "It won't mess with your good looks, but we will need to keep an eye on you, especially tonight." 

Eggsy's smile gets bigger. "We should all get matching tattoos." 

Merlin sighs. "Eggsy."

"Well, I don't want you to be in a situation where you'd have head wounds like us."

"I'm not leaving you two any time soon, thank you very much." Merlin reads Eggsy's chart for the fifth time, as Harry offers Eggsy a chip of ice. "What you need rest. Lots of lying about."

"Do I get a bell?" Eggsy asks, with a cheeky grin.

"No," Merlin and Harry adamantly say.


End file.
